Black line drawing on a white background of a heartbeat trace that turns into a treble clef and two musical notes, a fine line flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heartbeat line with treble clef and music notes

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a single continuous black line shaped like an ECG heartbeat trace, with a treble clef on the left and two beamed-style quaver notes on the right. The linework is even and uniform in weight, with solid black note heads and clef shape. The composition is horizontal and centred on a plain white background, with thin tails extending from both ends of the line.

Fine line Heartbeat Treble clef Music note Music

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had been taping paper strips from the monitor onto the back of a hymnal for three weeks when the night sister finally asked what she was doing. The machine on bay four threw its green trace across the screen and out of the printer in long zigzags, and Dilys had decided, somewhere around the second week, that the peaks had a rhythm no one else was bothering to hear.

Keep reading

She laid the strips flat on the nurses' station desk under a biro and a cold cup of tea. Each spike went onto the stave as a note, the long lazy dips became crotchets, and the quick double bump at three in the morning gave her a pair of quavers that she copied with a ruler because she did not trust her hand. The sister read the first page over her shoulder and said nothing for a while, which Dilys took as permission.

By the Thursday the trace had settled into something almost sensible in G major. Mr Okonedo in bay four had been stubborn about his heart for six weeks, and Dilys would sit with him in the late hours while the machine kept its time, humming the line she had written so the notes sounded the way the spikes looked.

On Friday the printer jammed and the screen went flat for one long minute. Dilys stood up so fast her chair rolled into the sluice door. When the green line came back, it climbed with the same bright hook it always had, and she sat down again, pencilled a treble clef at the start of the next stave, and began to write.